Many years ago my father used to complain about powered car windows. They were ‘more crap to break.’ Go to a junkyard today and you can still roll down the windows in a car built in 1955. Now, you can’t even buy a car with window cranks. That’s fine until the switch breaks, the motor burns out or you’re trapped under water in an accident. It’s interesting to even unlock some cars with a dead battery. Continue reading »
As system developers, we always love talking shop. In the technology industry there are seemingly endless ways to get things done. Since we work in a general IT shop, we work on many platforms including Windows, OS X, portables, Linux and embedded systems.
The constant challenge is to learn (and remember) all the individual tools you need to develop solutions for each platform. At ICAL we use a product called XOJO to do a lot of our cross platform development. It is one of the few truly cross-platform tool sets. Continue reading »
There is an old adage about the cobbler’s children being last to get new shoes. So it goes for a technology company’s web site. ICAL’s previous web site was originally built in 2000. It was not a bad design. It did weather well, but it was paleolithic in technology terms.
We have always approached our clients. Rarely have people approached us, so we treated our web site like an online brochure. The old site covered the basics of who we are and how we work. The technology we use changes constantly, but those basics don’t. Continue reading »
For techies old enough to remember, remote computing is definitely not a new thing. Back when we were riding dinosaurs and coding programs with stone knives, there were ways to connect to your work computer remotely. Some of us wrote entire programs that way. Continue reading »
ICAL has spent 15 years in the cloud. Yes, we know, we don’t need to state the obvious, but seriously, we have been developing and later hosting remote applications for 15 years. When we started building remote applications, they weren’t even called cloud services. We just thought of them as remote programs, just like the network applications we had been building for years. Continue reading »